playground

The DeepSeek API in a browser, with no API key. Enrolling costs about a second of CPU and nothing else — no account, no email, no card.

What this is. A gateway run by this project holds a real DeepSeek API key and relays your requests, metered and capped. To stop one person draining it for everyone, enrolling asks your browser to solve a small proof-of-work puzzle. That puzzle is the whole signup.

model deepseek-v4-flash
per day 30 requests · 60k input · 20k output tokens
privacy prompts are relayed to DeepSeek and are not stored or logged by the gateway; only token counts and cost are recorded
when it runs out the quota resets at 00:00 UTC, and the CLI with your own key has no limits at all

Why the puzzle

Because the alternative is a signup form. Every request here spends real money on a real API key, so something has to stop one script taking the lot. An account would do it and would also be the thing that stops most people trying at all — so instead your browser burns about a second of CPU, once, and that is the account.

It is not a security boundary and is not pretending to be one. Identities can be farmed; a daily budget cap cannot be. That cap is what actually protects the service, which is why the puzzle can stay small enough not to matter to you. The reasoning is written out in gateway/DESIGN.md.

The command panel is the point

Whatever you set on the right, the panel shows the deepseek invocation that does the same thing. Get the request right here, take the line away with you. Everything on this page works from a terminal, and from a terminal it also streams to stdout, keeps a usage ledger, and remembers the conversation.

$ go install github.com/thevibeworks/deepseek-cli/cmd/deepseek@latest
$ deepseek free
$ deepseek chat "why is the sky blue"

The CLI and this page enrol against the same gateway with the same protocol and get the same quota — but they are separate implementations of it, in different languages, pinned to a shared table of test vectors.

What it will not do

deepseek-v4-pro. Three times the price. The free tier serves flash and refuses pro outright rather than quietly downgrading it, because an answer you attribute to the wrong model is worse than no answer.
Long prompts. Bodies are capped at 128KB, output at 4K tokens per call.
Tools. They are forwarded, but this page does not run them. Neither does the CLI — it prints them.

All of those limits disappear the moment you use your own key, which costs about a third of a cent for a thousand ordinary turns. That is the honest pitch: this exists so you can find out whether the API is worth a key, without needing one first.